Four years ago, in the 2012 edition of Agenda for Social Justice, I wrote about citizens’ frustration with Federal policy-making, their “growing anger around bipartisan decisions that go against the grain of public desire,” and their increasing support for policies advancing social justice. When I wrote that, many of the encampments of the Occupy Wall Street movement (OWS) had already been dismantled, but their calls for the country to address economic inequality had an impact on the 2012 election. President Obama was asked about OWS in a news conference of October 6, 2011. His response was, “I think it expresses the frustrations that the American people feel—that we had the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, huge collateral damage all throughout the country, all across Main Street.… the protestors are giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works.”

We continue to see this manifested in this year’s Presidential election cycle, where anti-establishment campaigns in both dominant political parties have garnered much popular support. Analysts say that the message of political and economic inequality has resonated with many voters on the left and the right who feel they have been left out and left behind in the economic recovery from the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009. Thus, many Americans believe that establishment politicians no longer represent the interests of the people. Most 2015 studies show that income and wealth inequality, indeed, have risen over the last few decades, and have continued to rise since the 2012 publication of Agenda for Social Justice, by some measures, to record levels.

Times when Federal policies have decreased social inequality

There are two historical periods where economic inequality and/ or poverty were significantly reduced in the United States due to an expansion of federal policies, programs, and funds investing in a social safety net: the first being in the years following Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s (FDR) ‘New Deal’ programs implemented from 1933 to 1938 to stave off the Great Depression, and the second, in the years following Lyndon Baines Johnson’s (LBJ) Great Society programs of 1964 to 1969.